The rumor-mill is calling for an upgrade to iLife, Apple’s suite of digital lifestyle applications that come preinstalled on every Mac. French site Mac4Ever.com claims that Apple will ship the next edition of iLife on August 7. It’ll be free on new Macs or a $79 value if purchased at retail.

TUAW chimed in by noting that the next edition of iLife will be ready in time for Apple’s back-to-school season, pointing at an Amazon listing for the “iLife ’10 for Dummies” manual. More importantly, Mac4Ever.com writes, all applications in the suite are believed to have been rewritten to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s 64-bit technology.

Apple has allegedly enabled a deeper social integration across all apps. Currently, you can export photos from iPhoto to Facebook and synchronize name tags, publish movies in iMovie directly to YouTube, and more.

The updated iPhoto and iWeb apps, the report claims, will see major improvements, especially the Faces and Places features of the former app.

The biggest news is a rumored addition of a mysterious new application, Mac4Ever wrote. If you ask Boy Genius Report, this mystery app could replace iDVD (which will be a goner) as a brand new tool for authoring DVDs, but also iTunes LP digital albums and iTunes Extras packages that enhance iTunes music and movies with interactive bells and whistles. MobileMe Gallery is also reportedly getting Faces and Places features.

Christian’s Opinion

It’s no secret Apple hasn’t been updating iDVD as aggressively as other apps in the suite, for the same reason for which the company is refusing to replace Superdrive on Macs with Blu-ray drives. For Apple, physical media is dead so killing iDVD to focus on a brand new authoring tool for emerging formats like iTunes Extras and iTunes LP makes sense.

That iWeb is undergoing some serious changes is also interesting because Apple left that app stagnate, probably in order to avoid competing directly with Adobe’s web authoring tools on the Mac. Now that Apple and Adobe are at odds, I expect iWeb to eventually become a serious HTML5 and WYSIWYG authoring tool.